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Q Mac Format

I have knocked 35GB off the SSD in my 2017 MacBook Pro: 32GB for Ubuntu Mate 22.04 LTS and 3GB for the boot partition. Except for the soundcard, Ubuntu Mate was working right out of the box. I am pretty sure there is Intel High Definition Audio onboard, but being a Mac user since Snow Leopard, I am a little rusty in finding and installing drivers. Can you please tell me how to turn on sound?

My data is currently on a 150GB HFS+ partition. I would like it to be equally available (and manageable) on Mac OS Sierra and Ubuntu Mate. What filesystem do you recommend?

Niels A

A Before you do anything else, go into the mixer and make sure the soundcard is not muted; some setups do this as a default. If that doesn’t help, the next step is to find out which sound device you have. Open a terminal and run:

$ lspci

You may need to run this command with sudo . You’ll see a list of devices, each with a number – find your sound device, for example: 00:1f.3 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation...

Use the -s option to limit the output to a specific device and -k to show the kernel module it uses – device drivers are implemented as kernel modules in Linux. So, for the above example you would run:

$ lspci -k -s 00:1f.3

If a module is found, the card should work, but you may have to select a different profile. If it does not have a module loaded, a quick trip to your favourite search engine should tell you which module your card needs. You can test it by forcing it to load in a terminal:

$ sudo modprobe -v name_of_module

If that works, you can force the module to be loaded at boot by putting its name in a file in /etc/modprobe.d. The name of the file is unimportant but it must end in .conf.

If the correct module is loaded and you still have no sound, you may be running the wrong profile and trying to send sound to a non-existent device, such as an HDMI port. Run Pavucontrol to see and select from a list of available sound profiles.

There’s a number of command-line tools for investigating the system, but there are also all-in-one tools such as Inxi (https://github.com/smxi/inxi) and graphical tools such as Hardinfo (https://github.com/lpereira/hardinfo).